AMD today announced the immediate availability of three new members of the Six-Core AMD Opteron processor family that specifically address rising demand for balanced systems with increased performance yet greater power-efficiency for cloud computing and web serving environments.

The 55W ACP Six-Core AMD Opteron HE processors are currently shipping for 2-, 4- and 8-P systems and available today in new systems from HP, addressing the needs of dynamic, performance hungry and power constrained data centers. Systems from additional OEMs are expected to come to market throughout Q309.

These new processors meet the market demand for highly scalable, power-efficient systems that are especially well suited for Web serving and cloud computing workloads and they are available with the same AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) technology and AMD-P technology features and advanced I/O capabilities as the standard power Six-Core AMD Opteron processors.

Processors with even greater energy efficiency are planned to be available later this year for the market segment where low power is the singular priority requirement.

For customers that require the ultimate performance for mission critical workloads such as database and CRM applications, AMD is also unveiling two new, full-featured Six-Core AMD Opteron SE processors at 2.8 GHz for 2-, 4- and 8-P systems.

"Since our initial introduction of multi-core processors for the server market, it's been the AMD mission to help IT managers reduce datacenter energy costs without compromising performance," said Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager, Server Business, AMD. "These new lower power Six-Core AMD Opteron processors feature the highest performance-per-watt that we have brought to market, and help drive down power consumption while addressing the shifting cloud and Web landscape of today's datacenter. And with six cores of compute power and Direct Connect Architecture, these processors deliver no-compromise performance."

"Customers are using HP ProLiant G6 server solutions, which offer up to 45% better performance than previous generations, enabling customers to get more value out of their IT dollar," said Jim Ganthier, vice president of Marketing, Industry Standard Servers, HP. "The combination of HP ProLiant G6 server technology and Six-Core AMD Opteron HE processors provide customers with powerful and energy-efficient technology for a superior return on their server investment."

"IBM is all about innovation; and since 2003, we have worked closely with AMD to innovate with AMD Opteron processors in our System x and BladeCenter offerings," said Alex Yost, vice president, IBM Systems & Technology Group. "IBM has collaborated with AMD to offer the LS42, the only scalable blade server in the industry that can grow from 2 sockets to 4 sockets, protecting client investment. We will also introduce the new Six-Core AMD Opteron HE processor in our System x3755 server, including our innovative 3-socket implementation that helps clients to save cost and get competitive performance compared to 4-socket servers."

My bet is that these will be available for desktop systems- sort of. I see them releasing the Hex-core AMD Opteron processor for single socket systems not too long from now. That means that hopefully with a BIOS update, an AM3 or AM2+ board will be able to house one of these Opterons.

Im wondering if the 6 core version can come close to the performance of an i7

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Not performance, but in "total work done"/watt, I've seen in some reviews that these 6-core AMD's are very comparable to the i7 version Xeons -- ie, they're not as fast, but they can get more work done per chip. Wish I could find that review.

It'll gain attractiveness once AMD releases their new line of chipsets (barring some disastrous flaw).

The long life of the nVidia chipsets for Opterons has been great for server farms and the like, with most CPU upgrades only requiring a BIOS update. But now they need to catch up and offer current gen features to compete with the i7/i9 platform.

But it won't be. In order to get high clockspeeds, you have to cut back on the amount of work you can accomplish per clock (alternatively, increase that wattage figure). Instead of aimming for simple, fast processors, they are going for complex, slow processors; different means to the same end.

IBM has released 5 GHz POWER6 processors but they are 165w TDP, are water-cooled, and very expensive.